


Not the Same as Other Days

by especiallythezefronposter



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adoption, Bullying, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, High School, Hiking, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Road Trips, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 03:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14762097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/especiallythezefronposter/pseuds/especiallythezefronposter
Summary: 'Are we brothers?', Tony asks after a while.Bruce considers this. 'We didn't really grow up together. You've only moved in this year.' It feels like much more time has passed than that, a summer that lasted ages.'We have the same guardians. Technically that makes us brothers, right?'Bruce is quiet for a while, their eyes locked even as they walk. 'I doesn't feel like we're brothers.'





	Not the Same as Other Days

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this specific story a couple of years ago, along with a couple more paragraphs and some notes on how to continue. Despite that, I never did continue writing this and it ended up sitting in my drafts for all this time. My characterisation of Bruce and Tony has changed so much that I can't possibly continue this, but I noticed while going through my drafts that this is actually pretty decent on it's own, although slightly open-ended, so, since the next chapter for Bruising the Sun isn't coming along right away, I'm just gonna post this.

Bruce Banner has known Tony Stark all his life. The Starks are old friends of his aunt and uncle's and years ago, when Bruce was no more than five and had only just moved in with them, they came by for dinner almost every other week, or the Walters family would go to their home. Bruce was such a scared kid back then, afraid of thunder and the dark and even of his own uncle and Mr. Stark. They didn't look like his dad, but they had the same sort of hands.

Bruce knows now that five-year-olds are not supposed to live in a house where they don't know where all the light switches are. That five-year-olds should not be recovering from a black eye and a broken nose and torn ligaments in their right arm and two crushed toes and a cut that needed fourteen stitches on their right shoulder and bruises all over, everywhere they look. Children of five are not supposed to have scars anywhere other than their knees. Bruce knows that now, but then, when Tony, still four years old, had asked him why he had a black eye and his arm was in a cast, Bruce didn't know that he could have just told him that he had fallen off his bike, that he could have lied and Tony would never have known. Instead he ignored Tony, and decided he didn't like him very much, and Tony must have made that same decision.

Before and after dinner they always ended up in the living room together, either with Bruce's sparse toys or Tony's vast collection strewn out between them, and pretended to play together so that the grownups wouldn't bother them, and talked to each other very little. Later, at seven years old, they both discovered science and the section of the library dedicated to it, but it wasn't true that they had found a shared interest, as their guardians believed. Tony liked to read about robots and spaceships and how elaborate machines worked and were made. Bruce read about living things, rainforests and infections and patterns in nature. They treated each other with a cold sort of respect, their relationship a mere formality of _hello_ s, _'till next time_ s.

They got older and grew more different and further apart. By the time they were twelve, Tony played on his phone while Bruce read and Bruce wished desperately that Tony didn't know anyone in Bruce's middle school, because then he would know how often Bruce was bullied, how pathetic he really was. 

At thirteen Tony starts telling him about girls, about kissing and boobs and porn. He mostly does it because of how uncomfortable it makes Bruce, and how obvious it is that no girl would ever want to be near Bruce while they seem to be waiting in line for Tony. One of the kids in Bruce's school punches him. Bruce gets a panic attack and spends the rest of the week at home, unsure whether he is sick or only pretending to be. The bullying gets worse after that and when the Starks come over, Bruce stays in his room until dinner is ready and retreats again immediately after he's finished, not speaking to or even looking at Tony at all. When they go over to the Starks, he stays at the table instead of sitting with Tony in the living room and barely speaks at all.

Tony has only graduated from middle school a week or so ago, and it has only been summer for a couple of days when Howard and Maria Stark die in a car crash on a holiday in Switzerland. Tony and Bruce sit next to each other at the funeral and every time Bruce looks at Tony, he isn't crying. He doesn't even really look sad as he keeps his eyes trained on the two coffins in front of him, only angry.

After the service Tony goes home with them and Bruce gets the mattress from the attic and lays it out in his room for himself to sleep on. He offered to sleep on the couch when his aunt told him Tony would sleep in his bed, but she told him Tony shouldn't be alone on a night like this one. He wonders where Tony slept the nights between the car crash and the funeral, but he isn't sure if that's something he has the right to ask. He wonders where he himself slept the nights between his father killing his mother and his aunt and uncle taking him in, but he doesn't remember and he isn't sure if anyone else does either.

He spends the day reading and browsing the internet while his aunt goes to work and his uncle and Tony go to pick up Tony's stuff at his house.

Tony and Bruce don't speak to each other when they take turns getting ready for bed in the bathroom, and Tony accepts to sleep in Bruce's bed instead of the mattress on the floor after only polite protest. The next morning, Tony is already awake when Bruce wakes up. 'Do you have nightmares often?', he asks, curious rather than worried or annoyed. It reminds Bruce of a four-year old asking him about his black eye.

Bruce doesn't remember having a nightmare, but he never does. The thought of Tony watching him twist and cower on the matrass angers him, but that's better than being ashamed. 'Yes. Do you want to shower first or can I?'

That day a lawyer comes by and Tony and Bruce's aunt and uncle disappear into the living room with her for over two hours. At dinner, Tony isn't there, but Bruce's aunt and uncle explain to him that Tony is coming to live with them, permanently. Both Maria's and Howard's will said that in the event of both of them dying before Tony turned eighteen, the Walters would become his guardians. They had known about this, of course, but had never thought death would come for their friends so soon.

A week later they move to one of the Starks' residencies. One of, according to Tony, the smaller ones. It's old, not the style Bruce would expect from the Starks, so he assumes it must have been inherited from an older generation. The floors are all made out of real wood, there are four modest bedrooms and two large bathrooms that have obviously been renovated. The kitchen is big and homey and the smell of it reminds Bruce of his mother, though he doesn't remember how she smelled exactly, or what her voice sounded like, or what her favourite kind of pie was. Still he likes it, and he claims the bedroom with the largest windows.

They are all moved in in half a week and Tony and him spend the next few days exploring the garden, which is enormous, with trees and a creek and plants Bruce can name in three languages. It's poorly kept, but walking doesn't require talking to each other, so it's okay. They climb the highest tree, though they can't get that far up due to how thin the branches get. They try to kill the mosquitoes that land on the other's skin, slapping their hardest even though both hitting and being hit make Bruce feel like the mosquitoes have crawled underneath his skin and are filling up his throat. Tony spends ten minutes chasing a frog, which then disappears underneath the hedge separating their garden from the next. Bruce sits quietly by the creek and catches him another one. When he presents it to Tony he gets a genuine smile from him, which is a first. They try to build a hut out of sticks and fail miserably, undone by ambition rather than lack of skill. They play a game in which they try to hit each other with acorns and steal the stuff the other hid around the garden while trying to defend their own possessions.

They stay out until it gets, quite unexpectedly, dark. The silence when they are brushing their teeth in the bathroom they claimed is different now. Companionable instead of tense.

Bruce lends Tony some of his CDs. Tony shows him a cat video. Bruce defends him when Tony has an argument with his aunt and uncle about going to a party. Tony brings him his favourite candy when he goes grocery shopping with his aunt. A remark about Tony's shoes escalates into a fight. They have a movie night. They fight a lot more. They watch a lot more movies. All of the good days are spent in the garden. Tony goes to visit his aunt Peggy and her wife in New York a handful of times. They help Bruce's aunt bake pies for the baking sale. Tony runs away seven times, breaking into his old house or a joint of the company that went to Stane after his parents' death. The four of them paint the living room yellow. Bruce and Tony have a fight so bad that they don't speak to each other for three days. They go see the worst movie in the theatre to make up. As a holiday, the four of them go hiking in a national park. Bruce googles how to build a tree house and that same day they go shopping for supplies. They finish it two weeks later and get in a fight when Tony cancels on movie night - now a regular thing - to go out with friends. They make up. Summer comes to an end.

They go to the same high school and on the first day, Bruce is nauseous with nerves because Tony already knows half the people there and he's going to be all alone and the bullying is going to start again and Tony will know. He spends his first days avoiding as many people as he can, while Tony befriends everyone he didn't yet know, but after a while the newness wears off and things start to settle. This is when the bullies notice Bruce. At first it's just verbal attacks. Bruce can live with that. He isn't scared of dumb kids projecting their insecurities on him. He isn't scared. Even when they're picking on him in the hallway and Tony walks past, he isn't scared. His whole body screams _weak_ , screams _target_. Tony must have smelled it on him from the moment they met. Still it stings when Tony just walks past, barely looking at Bruce at all. He greets the bullies by name, with a smile, and doesn't look in the slightest like he disapproves.

They don't talk about it, not even when the bullies start pushing Bruce into lockers, not even when they beat him up one time after school and he tells his aunt and uncle he got into a fight, makes it sound like it's his fault, even though Tony must have heard them boast about it the next day.

They spend a lot of time together, making homework in the tree house or listening to music in either of their rooms, but they don't talk about anything important, about how Tony never visits his parents' graves and Bruce still flinches every time Tony raises his hand to him, about how Tony is sixteen but can already hold his liquor like he's been drinking all his life. Once Bruce sleeps through his alarm and gets a panic attack when Tony shakes him awake. Once Bruce hears two voices moaning in the boy's bathroom at school and knows full well that one of them is Tony's. They don't talk about how long it takes for Bruce to catch his breath every time Tony uses the word _freak_. They don't talk about all the different shades of lipstick smudges on Tony's skin and the two times he runs away after telling their guardians that he's okay, that he won't do it again. When Tony walks into their bathroom without knocking, Bruce freezes, but Tony only stares for a moment at the blood running into the tub from the cuts Bruce has made across his ribs and then closes the door again, adding Bruce's self-harm to the list of things they don't talk about.

Their aunt teaches them how to drive and when they both pass their test they get a crappy second hand car to celebrate. They take turns driving each other to school, Tony talking about their classmates while Bruce either focuses on the road or fidgets in the passenger seat. He gets beaten up again and Tony drives him to the ER for his broken nose and calls their guardians to tell them they're doing an assignment with some other people and are meeting to work on it. They still don't talk about the bullying.

Once, when they're home alone for the weekend Tony punches Bruce. The breach of trust stings more than the blow itself, but then Tony hits him right in the nose and both pains are pretty much even. Bruce tries to make himself small, loses track of his surroundings except for Tony standing over him.

'Why don't you hit back?', Tony asks over the blood rushing in Bruce's ears. He sounds frustrated. Another punch lands, this one against the back of Bruce's head, which he didn't cover with his arms.

Tony kicks his shins. 'Come on,' he says. 'Hit me back.'

The only thing Bruce can think is that he trusts Tony, he trusts him and this shouldn't be happening. Tony punches him again, but not as hard and then his voice is soft and his hands are gone. 'Shit, Bruce,' he says. 'Why the fuck don't you hit back?' The couch dips when Tony comes to sit beside Bruce and Bruce raises his head out of his hands to take off is glasses and wipe away his tears with the end of his sleeve. 

He glances at Tony, who is looking at him in a way Bruce can't read. 'What did you do that for?'

'You never hit them back. At school, you don't fight back.'

Bruce feels small and shaky and breathless. And tired, he's so tired of being afraid. 'So you... what? You punish me?' He hates how hurt he sounds, how little satisfaction he feels at Tony's guilty look.

'No...' Tony sighs. 'I though you would - if you were angry enough you would hit me back.'

'It didn't work,' Bruce deadpans.

'I'm sorry.'

When Bruce can breathe again, he walks over to the DVD player and turns on the first DVD he finds. Tony goes to get popcorn and when he returns, Bruce gives him a smile like nothing has happened.

That same night Bruce wakes up from a clicking noise. He gets out of bed and watches Tony climb out of the hallway window from his doorway. Tony sees him, but they don't speak, Bruce's gaze steady and Tony's eluding. Bruce doesn't sleep until Tony returns at five pm, clothes rumpled and hair messy in a way that Bruce knows has something to do with girls and parties. He can smell the booze on him and retreats to his room before he can panic.

The next night Tony sneaks out again, but he doesn't return. It's the first time in two months that he runs away.

Their guardians let Bruce skip school to go and find him and he spends most of the morning driving around town and calling Tony on his phone. He eats a breakfast of doughnuts at eleven thirty as he drives down the highway. He isn't really going anywhere. Tony isn't coming back until he's ready to and Bruce deserves a vacation. He ends up in some tiny ghost town and takes pictures of the church and a street of abandoned houses and a cow in the middle of the road. He even buys a postcard in a gas station near it and then gets back on the highway, making sure not to stray too far away from home. He drives and buys lots of Mars bars for himself and a Cherry Coke for Tony when he comes back. He turns up the radio and opens the windows as he speeds down the empty highway and there's nothing else in his head than the noise. For a moment he feels cleansed.

Tony calls him at four pm, voice hoarse as he tells Bruce where he is. 

Bruce makes a U-turn and stops at Hammer's house - mansion - ten minutes later. Tony is standing outside, sharing a cigarette with someone Bruce can't see behind the pillars of the front porch. Tony comes to the car swiftly, handing the cigarette over to the other person and kissing them goodbye. Bruce is pretty sure it's a boy, not a girl, and that they're definitely kissing even though they're behind the pillar. Tony calls Bruce faggot sometimes, when they fight and Tony tells him he will never have friends like Tony does because he's weak and gay and can't stand up for himself. It isn't really possible that he's into boys.

Tony gets in the car, not looking at Bruce. There's a silence before Bruce starts the car and drives away, in which he breathes in Tony's smell, slowly spreading through the car like an invisible cloud. It's definitely Hammers cologne, the one he wears at school when he gets in Bruce's face and tells him he won't ever have any friends. He imagines them fleetingly, blowing smoke into each other's lungs on Hammer's silk sheets.

Then he drives away, rolling his shoulders so that Tony won't notice him shuddering. He's silent for a while and Tony is, too, unsettlingly so. The exhaustion is dripping off of him, but there's an energy underneath it that Bruce doesn't know how to interpret, the bouncing of Tony's leg and the twitching of his fingers.

Bruce flicks the postcard at him. 'I got you a Cherry Coke', he says, loud enough to startle Tony.

Tony picks up the card and stares at it, then carefully slides it into his bag. 'How long have you been looking?'

'Since seven.'

'You didn't go to school.'

Bruce only shakes his head. He doesn't have to explain to Tony how grateful he is for that. 'Were you kissing Hammer?'

Tony fidgets, though the rest of his posture has become a practiced sort of relaxed. 'Yeah,' he says.

'Do you like him?'

'Sometimes.'

'And the rest of the time?'

'I just need another drink.'

Bruce is quiet for a while, still aware of Tony's nervous hands. 'Then I think you deserve better.'

'What?' He sounds slow and tired and like he's expecting to get hurt.

Bruce glances at him. 'I think there's people who deserve to kiss you much more than Justin Hammer does.'

'Oh,' he says. 'You don't think it's wrong?'

Bruce shrugs. 'I think the way Hammer treats me is wrong. Kissing you is the least wrong thing he's ever done as far as I know.' He's surprised that Tony would think Bruce would have anything against it. He thought that Tony knew, if not about Bruce being bi, then at least about him liking boys, but why would he. Bruce has never been with anyone before.

'Oh,' Tony says again, hollowly, like he isn't really sure what's going on yet. He looks around, notices where they're going and frowns instead of smiling. 'I don't want to go home yet,' he says. 'It's past four. Tomorrow is a Saturday. We can do whatever we want.'

'Ben and Sue will worry,' Bruce says, though he drives past their house.

'I'll call them, tell them we're okay and stuff. I'll even give them an exact hour and we'll be back by then, okay?' He's already getting his phone out of his pocket, looking at Bruce with eyes that have probably convinced people to do worse things than having fun.

Bruce carefully avoids these eyes. 'Depends on the hour, I guess, and on what they'll say.'

'Ten am, and they'll say fine. I'm not going to drink the whole night, you're not going to cut yourself, though I don't think they even know about that, but still they know we'll be fine if we're together. We’ll find a trail somewhere and hike and throw acorns at each other.'

Bruce smiles despite himself. He can feel panic burning his cheeks at the casual mention of his scabbed over cuts, but the rest of it is soothing, the promise of something safe and familiar. 'The one we did with Ben and Sue in the summer?', Bruce asks before he can stop himself. Tony nods. 'I don't have any other clothes with me, or a toothbrush or enough money for dinner.'

'I have money and you don't need more clothes. We'll sleep in the car and buy anything we need at a gas station or in some dumb town.'

Bruce just shakes his head and gets onto the highway. 'I'm not going to drive all the way, though.' 

'I'll take over later. I just need to call Ben and Sue and take a nap.'

Bruce spends the entire call - which lasts long and during which Tony says very little - wondering when Tony started trusting him. Tony barely sleeps, even if he doesn't sneak out, Bruce can sometimes hear music coming from Tony's room, or the muffled voices of a movie. He makes his homework at night and reads and draws and does whatever else he can to keep himself awake. When he sleeps it's either a nap squeezed into twenty, or sometimes even ten minutes, or a deep twelve-hour sleep he doesn't wake up from unless his body is ready to. The latter doesn't happen often enough, and only accidentally, or around people he trusts. He never sleeps when Bruce is around, not even a nap, if he can help it.

'Just wake me up in twenty and I'll take over,' Tony says as he shoves his phone into his pocket and settles into the most comfortable position he can manage in the seat.

Bruce doesn't wake Tony in twenty, but drives for an hour, then stops the car and shakes Tony awake as gently as he knows how. The scariest thing about growing bigger is that his hands are starting to look like his father's if he doesn't focus on them enough.

Tony is quiet and confused for a moment, blurred at the edges, and Bruce thinks Hammer deserves this even less than Tony's kisses, his vulnerability. The way he doesn't speak for a moment, and his eyes don't focus and his hands reach immediately for Bruce's arms, not to stop him but to hold on. Tony would always be looking for warmth if he weren't so concerned about getting burned.

For a moment there is only this: Bruce's hands on Tony's shoulders, Tony's on his upper arms, their breath fogging so close to each other.

'Your turn,' Bruce says, leaning back to turn the engine back on. 'This wreck turns into a fridge if the heating is off for too long.'

'It's worse outside,' Tony mumbles as he starts to shift in his seat. His hair is tousled and his voice is husky and Bruce isn't sure what's going on for a moment.

'What are you -'

Tony is climbing on top of him, that's what he's doing.

'Move over!', Tony complains. 'We're switching seats without opening the doors.'

It's way harder than just going outside, but, after Bruce having to take off his glasses and meeting several parts of Tony's body with his face, they're in each other's seats.

'That was unnecessary,' Bruce says as he puts on his glasses again and fixes his hair.

'So is this whole trip.' Tony doesn't even try to do anything about the mess that is his hair, simply drives away. 'So is our whole existence. Doesn't mean it can't be fun.'

There's a silence. 'Do you think it is - fun?'

Tony glances at him, frowning a little. 'Changing seats like that?'

'Existing,' Bruce says, painfully aware of the differences between them. When asked, people would describe Tony with words like _happy_ and _sociable_ and _fun_. Bruce would be _shy_ and _friendly_ and _quiet_ , and if the people got to really be honest, _weird, scared, lonely, pathetic. Freak._

Tony considers this for a moment, lifting one hand from the steering wheel to scrub at his lips with his knuckles. 'Don't you?', he asks. He's not just automatically bouncing back the question. He sounds serious, concerned, afraid.

Bruce can't say anything.

Tony looks at him again, only glancing at the road to check he's still on it. 'There's good moments, right? For all the bad things that happen at school and stuff there's all the nice stuff that happens at home?'

'Yes,' Bruce says. 'There's the nice stuff.' He smiles at Tony and Tony looks back at the road. He doesn't say anything about the memories that never really leave the back of his mind, the anger that's always there even when he's having a good time. He lets Tony believe in a simpler world and hopes he'll be happier for it.

Bruce must have dozed off at some point in the companionable silence that followed, because the next thing he knows he's jolting awake, the hands from his nightmare not quite gone from his skin yet.

Tony glances at him in the rear-view mirror and holds out his glasses for him. Bruce takes them, confused as to how they ended up in Tony's hands in the first place. He's glad, though. Sleeping with glasses is hell.

''m sorry. I didn't know if it'd be okay to wake you,' Tony says. 'You were having a nightmare,' he adds.

'Yes,' Bruce says. 'It's fine. It would only have made it worse, I think.'

There's a silence.

Tony breaks it cautiously. 'What are the nightmares about? You don't – I know it’s none of my business, but if you want to talk about it.'

This is when Bruce realizes that Tony never knew. He knows about everything else, the bullying and the cutting and how badly Bruce reacts to anything resembling violence, but he doesn't know about what's behind it.

'I... um, I got beaten up sometimes. By my father.'

Tony frowns, not understanding. 'Ben?', he tries, before realising: 'Your biological father. I thought you... I don't know what I thought. I never really wondered.'

'He's in jail now,' Bruce says, because he can't think of anything else to say.

'Oh,' Tony says. He doesn't seem to know what to say, either, which is new to Bruce.

'Are we almost there?' he asks to change the subject.

'Yeah, ten minutes or so.'

They stop at a gas station to buy beef jerky and Skittles (Bruce doesn't want to have anything to do with these) and M&Ms and sandwiches and Cherry Cokes and normal Cokes and water bottles and pastel coloured blankets that are on sale and make Tony grin and tell Bruce to buy four purple ones, so that there's no scenario in which Bruce doesn't end up with a purple one. This makes Bruce laugh, surprised that Tony remembers the one time they sort of got along before Tony came to live with him.

For Christmas, when Bruce was seven or eight, Maria Stark had decided that she had to knit all of them a sweater, since she had taught herself to knit sweaters from a magazine on a handful of eight-hour flights. She had decided that Bruce's had to be purple, but hadn't found any other kind of purple yarn than a terrible pastel variety that might only have looked okay on a baby. 

Bruce had politely accepted the gift, and had complimented Maria on her work, and had pulled on the sweater as he was expected to. He had blushed and panicked when he realised he would have to spend an entire Christmas in the living room with Tony wearing that atrocious sweater, but Tony had only laughed. It wasn't a mean kind of laugh. The first time someone had laughed _with_ Bruce instead of _at_ him, the first time he was in on the joke. They had shared these giddy laughs for the rest of the night, warm laughs that you felt in your belly and your cheeks and the tips of your fingers. 

Tony had said, 'My mom says everything looks good on me. We need to test the theory.' and Bruce had given him the sweater and Tony looked terrible in it and they laughed even more. 

Bruce had asked, 'What colour did you get?' and Tony had told him he didn't get a sweater, and he wore Bruce's for the rest of the night. Bruce didn't mention it.

Bruce puts the blankets on the counter with the drinks and the food and Tony pays with bills from a wad of cash he digs out of his jeans pocket. It's the kind of cash you cross state lines with, the kind of cash you can buy bus tickets and cramped motel rooms and cheap diner food with for at least a week. Bruce wonders if Tony always keeps this kind of money around when he leaves. Bruce wonders why he always comes back before he needs it.

It takes a while to find the hiking trail and by the time they finally park the car, it's getting dark and they've eaten all of the sandwiches. Tony fishes a flashlight from underneath the driver's seat and reaches for the blankets in the back seat. He puts their food and drinks in the backpack he took to Hammer's and slings it over his shoulder. He gets out.

'Are you tired?', he asks as Bruce follows.

'No,' Bruce says. 'You're not planning on sleeping tonight, are you.'

'I never am. And I wanna see the sun rise.' He drapes both of his blankets over his shoulders. 'We just have to find a nice spot,' he says.

Bruce bows to find an acorn and throws it at Tony in response. Tony laughs and runs off, the blankets trailing behind him like a cape. The next hours are spent chasing each other in an intricate game of war-acorns. Bruce wins, as he usually does, by ambushing Tony. Tony is a sore loser, but he's impressed enough by Bruce's tactics not to be too annoying about it.

They keep going in a random direction, their breath slowing down now that the action is over. Tony digs the beef jerkey out of his backpack, and they eat it in silence. 'Are we brothers?', Tony asks after a while.

Bruce considers this. 'We didn't really grow up together. You've only moved in this year.' It feels like much more time has passed than that, a summer that lasted ages.

'We have the same guardians. Technically that makes us brothers, right?'

Bruce is quiet for a while, their eyes locked even as they walk. 'I doesn't feel like we're brothers.'

Tony nods earnestly. 'So we aren't?'

'I don't think so. Does it matter?'

Tony shrugs, though obviously he isn’t neutral on this subject. 'Guess not.'

'No, seriously.'

'It's just that... You're my best friend.'

'You - what?', Bruce asks softly. He had figured Tony mainly talks to him because they live in the same house, had never even considered them being 'friends', even though it is an accurate way of describing the way he sees Tony. He just never imagined Tony thinking of him that way.

'Aren't we?', Tony ads. 'We do everything together. We have our own treehouse.'

'I guess,' Bruce says.

Tony stops walking. 'No, seriously,' he echoes dryly.

Bruce sighs and stops walking, too. 'We barely talk about things that matter. We fight all the time. Whenever people are mean to me at school you just smile at them.'

Tony looks hurt or guilty or both. 'I don't know what else to do,' he says after a long time. 'What do you want me to do? Ask you about your scars every night? Piss off Thunderbolt so he can beat me up, too? You're all fucked up and I'm all fucked up, what the fuck is there to be done?'

Bruce starts walking again, but Tony doesn't follow. 'That's not what I mean.' He turns to call, 'You don't trust me,' then keeps walking, hands in his pockets.

There's no answer, so Bruce stops walking, though he doesn't face Tony.

'Do you trust _me_ , then?'

Bruce looks back at Tony, who is standing there with his dumb purple blankets wrapped around him, looking miserable. He wants to say yes, but he'd be lying. 'No.' It barely even makes it past his lips, but he can tell Tony hears from the way he flinches and covers his eyes with a hand. Bruce doesn't think he's really crying, just sad.

'Stop,' he says, walking back to Tony, who looks up but doesn't move. 'We're taking all of that back. We're not talking anymore unless we're sure it's not going to screw anything up.' Tony is looking anywhere but at him, so Bruce puts a hand on his shoulder. 'Okay?'

Tony looks into his eyes very briefly. 'Okay,' he says.

Bruce wraps his arms around him, pulling him as close as he can. They've never really hugged before, but Tony hugs back immediately and buries his head in the juncture of Bruce's shoulder and neck.

They stand there for minutes or hours, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter that they let go eventually, because a closeness lingers, and it keeps Bruce warm.

The pick out the strangest shaped rocks for each other, laugh at bad puns and eat dried blueberries for early breakfast. Tony gets out the Skittles (and grudgingly also the M&Ms) and they throw them at each other and try to catch them with their mouths. By the time the sun rises they're sitting on a hill that looks out over a small, yellowed valley, nothing but a wrinkle in the landscape. They have collected more acorns and pebbles and try to throw them at the small round pond at the other side of the valley. Tony's winning from Bruce easily while the sky turns blue purple pink red orange yellow.

Tony is different when the sun is up, happier, like all of his optimism runs on solar energy. He pats Bruce's back and ruffles his hair and puts an arm around his shoulder as they make their way back to the car. He laughs and talks and smiles at the things Bruce says. He doesn't do that thing with his face where he's smiling genuinely one moment, and then he isn't anymore, but the corners of his mouth are still up.

Bruce thinks a couple of times, with a jolt in his stomach, of Tony kissing Hammer, of Tony being attracted to boys.

Bruce drives them all the way back while Tony sleeps in the passenger seat. There's something quiet about it, something peaceful about the way Tony shakes his head and mumbles something to someone he's dreaming up, how he smiles for the briefest of moments and his hands twitch. 

They are home by a quarter to ten, exhausted and smiling and happy to be back. Their guardians hug them and kiss their foreheads, but let them go to bed after that.

They become more careful. They still fight, but they stop speaking mid-sentence when they realise they're hurting each other and pull doors shut quietly instead of slamming them. These are strange fights to Bruce. He's used to Tony ignoring him, and he's used to ignoring Tony, but they never avoided each other like this before. When Tony enters the treehouse and Bruce is already there, he either leaves or Bruce does, while normally they'd both be too stubborn to even acknowledge the other's presence. Before, Bruce'd still read through Tony's essays for spelling mistakes even when they weren't talking, but now he doesn't even want to come anywhere near Tony's stuff.

These fights drag on longer and are awful and stressful and cause and impressive rise in chocolate consumption in the Walters household. The clothes Tony leaves lying around in their bathroom smell of cigarette smoke, and he sneaks out almost every night. He uses make-up to cover up the bags under his eyes and once Bruce uses a little of it, too, to make his eyes look less red from crying before he goes downstairs for dinner.

It gets worse every time, and even when they aren't fighting they barely speak to each other, though sometimes they hug and sometimes Tony says 'I trust you' and Bruce says 'I trust you, too' and they laugh because it sounds like they're saying something else.

A couple of months after their night-time hiking trip, they've been fighting for eight days and it's Sunday, though it's only been that way for half an hour or so. Bruce is doodling on a AP Maths assignment that he only has to hand in next week, but for some reason he needs to finish it tonight. He's convinced himself that if he finishes it now, he won't have any more nightmares for the rest of the night.

He hears Tony's door open, so he gets up and opens his own door to watch Tony crawl out of the window. The thing is that when his eyes adjust to the dark of the hallway, Tony isn't by the window. He's standing in his own door opposite Bruce, looking at the ground. 'I'm always afraid I'll regret you,' he says.

Bruce tries to say something, but he feels like his whole body is filled with emptiness and there's no room for words anymore. He knows what's coming. He can't breathe.

Tony walks up to him slowly, deliberately, and puts his hands on Bruce's cheeks, cradling his jaw like he's something breakable, something valuable. The panic disappears. He doesn't need to breathe. He needs Tony, and Tony is right here. Tony presses their lips together. This is Bruce's first kiss, but Tony knows what he's doing, so Bruce tries to do some of that, too. His lungs feel full, his throat unconstricted for the first time in what might be years, his whole goddamn life. They pull apart and he's still feeling okay, steady. For the first time that night, his hands aren't shaking.

Tony kisses the corner of his mouth, slides one hand to his neck to kiss his jaw, like he doesn't want to stop. Then he pulls away completely. Bruce feels warm on the inside, but his skin is cold where Tony touched it. He feels like crying, like tearing the light out of the sky and building a new world out of it for Tony. He feels like staying right there and watching as Tony opens the window and disappears through it while Bruce becomes part of the air they kissed in only seconds ago. He is a still pool of water. He is the thinnest cloud.

He goes back to his room and finishes the assignment and wakes up from a nightmare seven hours later, knowing that Tony has already returned and Bruce wasn't there.

The fight lasts for another three days before Bruce buys them tickets for a romantic comedy that he knows Tony will love and Tony insists on paying for the overpriced popcorn. They don't talk about the kiss, or about how Bruce spends most of the movie watching Tony smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Life on Earth by Snow Patrol


End file.
